Download Python 2.4 Documentation
(30 November 2004)

To download an archive containing all the documents for this
version of Python in one of various formats, follow one of links in
this table. The numbers in the table are the size of the download
files in Kilobytes.

Unpacking

Unix users should download the .tar.bz2 or .tgz archives; these are
bzipped (or gzipped) tar archives and can be handled in the usual way
using tar and the bzip2 or GNU gzip
program. The InfoZIP
unzip program can be used to handle the ZIP archives if
desired. Note that the .tar.bz2 archives provide the best
compression and fastest download times.

Windows users can use the ZIP archives since those are customary
on that platform. These are created on Unix using the InfoZIP zip
program. They may be unpacked using the free WiZ tool
(from the InfoZIP
developers) or the proprietary WinZip 7.0 tool. Many other
tools for handling ZIP archives are available; any of them should
work. WinZip can also
handle the gzipped tar archives if needed, but be careful that the
filenames may be mangled if you download these using a Web
browser.

Note that the .tar.bz2 files are smaller than the other archives;
Windows users may want to install the bzip2 tools on their systems as
well. Windows binaries for a command-line tool are available at The bzip2 and libbzip2
official home page. For a more typical Windows graphical
application, take a look at PowerArchiver. The bzip2 tools are free, but PowerArchiver is
shareware.

Problems

Printing PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0: Adobe has
reportedly admitted that there is a bug in Acrobat Reader 5.0 which
causes it not to print at least some PDF files generated by pdfTeX.
This software is used to produce the PDF version of the Python
documentation, and our documents definately trigger this bug in
Acrobat Reader. To print the PDF files, use ghostscript, or xpdf, or a newer version of
Adobe Acrobat.

Slow and aborted downloads: It has been reported that some
versions of the MacOS IP stack stall when downloading large files.
This problem only appears sporadically; if you have difficulties
retrieving any of these files under MacOS, please be patient and try
again later. The problems are supposed to be corrected in MacOS 9.
(For more information, see Apple's Technical
Note for Mac OS 9; in particular, see the third bulleted item
under "Open Transport 2.5" near the end.)

If you have comments or suggestions for the Python documentation,
please send email to <docs@python.org>.